Funded by the Swiss National Research Fund, Discarded Digital is a field research project conducted by Nicolas Nova, Anaïs Bloch and Thibault Le Page about the use/re-use/repurposing of digital technologies from the recent past. Both an inquiry into the second (and probably third) life of digital rubbish and an exploration of alternatives to e-waste recycling businesses this project aims at (1) documenting lesser known practices in the field of art, design and preservation, (2) grasping the kind of artifacts that emerged from them, and (3) understanding the skills they rely on and the knowledge they produce.
Relying on the anthropology of waste and the field of discarded studies, and applied to digital material, this project is an opportunity to examine in detail the multiple ways of mending the leftovers of the so-called digital revolution of the last fourty years, and to understand how they offer a relevant perspective on more durable scenario for informatics.